Development environment

Oh wow. This category mostly contains hacks and workarounds that are definitely not needed, recommended, or even safe in production environments. So, beware.

Fixing the error “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.”

"Publishing Failed" for an Azure Function

This post describes how to fix the error, where when publishing Azure Functions or Azure App Services you get an error like this: “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.”

This is luckily another straightforward fix! 

Problem

Azure Function Publish fails with a message:

“Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.”

It is, indeed, caused by some of your files at the target of your publishing being in use, so they cannot be overwritten. Great – an actually accurate error message! Much appreciated.

This seems to apply to Azure Functions CLI versions 2.x (currently in beta), and not for the stable versions. At least that’s the state at the time of writing this. There’s even this unresolved issue open about it on GitHub.

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Solving Azure Web Application’s first load perfomance issues

Microsoft Azure logo

Is your Azure Web Application suffering from absolutely horrible load times every time someone accesses it for the first time every 15 minutes or so? Mine was. It was pitiful.

I was developing a web-based service using EF6 and ASP.NET MVC 5, where all the assets were hosted in the Azure. Even though the app was reasonably lightweight and usually responded very fast, the first time someone accessed it in a while it took 20-60 seconds to load AND sometimes even timed out (especially with mobile clients). Load testing revealed only the what I already knew: initial load times were horrendous, but after that everything worked fine. I did eventually find the solution, though!

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Fixing the “Could not load file or assembly … or one of its dependencies” error

Visual Studio logo

This post describes how to fix the “Could not load file or assembly ‘<assemblyname>’ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.” error. 

Problem

Especially while installing a new dev machine, and building your project for the first time, you may end up getting the following exception:

Could not load file or assembly '<assemblyname>' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

No fear, though, as this is usually easily fixed. In quite a few cases, it’s simply a mismatch between architectures and easily changed.

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Getting Connect-MsolService (and other SharePoint Online cmdlets) to work

Connect-MsolService

In this post, I’ll try to archive everything you need to download and install to get commandlets like Connect-MsolService working. I’ve had to do it a couple of times when changing laptops, so it’s good to document them somewhere! 🙂

So, when would you need to follow this guide and install the modules described here? Mostly this comes to play, when you’re switching machines, try to run the SharePoint Online Management shell but it doesn’t even exist on the machine, or it does exist but you get random errors like this:

The term 'Connect-MsolService' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

This guide should help you out! I’ll try to keep it updated as things change.

Required installations:

  1. Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant for IT Professionals RTW
    1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=28177
  2. SharePoint Online Management Shell
    1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35588
  3. Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell (v1)
    1. http://connect.microsoft.com/site1164/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=59185 
      1. Update 5.3.2018: Microsoft actually moved this documentation, and apparently hid it behind authentication somewhere (might require Global Admin or similar on your tenant to even READ IT… That’s smart.)
      2. If you installed it before, it’ll still work, but if you didn’t, never mind. Just see this step.

Now, to run cmdlets like “Connect-MsolService”, just start SharePoint Online Management Shell (or PowerShell).

If you also need Azure Remote Management (AzureRM) cmdlets (I always do!), run this in an elevated PowerShell:

# Install the Azure Resource Manager modules from the PowerShell Gallery
Install-Module AzureRM

What to do if Microsoft hid the AAD module for PowerShell?

Fear not – only the last step (step 3) changed! Instead of installing the AAD module, you run this on PowerShell: Continue reading

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Remove-SPODeletedSite – Actually removing a SharePoint Online Site Collection

Delete site collection

This post describes the actual, working and fast process of removing a site collection in SharePoint Online using the Remove-SPODeletedSite commandlet in SharePoint Online Management Shell (a flavor of PowerShell).

Description

Sometimes you need to get rid of a site collection you’ve created in SharePoint Online. The most typical example perhap being removing the team site created for a group of people working together. That’s pretty simple and there are a few ways of doing that. For example, you might just go ahead, and delete the site from Site Settings (see below).

"Delete this site" on SharePoint Online

“Delete this site” on SharePoint Online – by the way, never use this, if there’s even a 1% you might want your data back! You might never get it.

Or maybe you’re a smart admin, and you go and remove it from the SharePoint Administration (below). Continue reading

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Applying Entity Framework’s Code-First Migrations against a Database in Azure by running Update-Database

This post describes how to run Entity Framework’s code-first migrations against a database located in the Windows Azure. This is done by running Update-Database commandlet with suitable switches, see below.

The problem and symptoms

Okay, so you’re developing your MVC+EF cool web app with a database in Azure, and you’re using code-first migrations. Cool! What’s nice with code-first-migrations is the fact they are run automatically even in the cloud the next time your app is running (as long as you publish your app with that little box ticked – something like in the screen capture below). But wait – what if there are conflicts – what kind of errors are you going to get?

 

Azure Web Publish

Azure Web Publish

Not very useful ones, I’m afraid, and it’s a pain navigating the Azure portal to fetch the log files. At some point – for me, it wasn’t the first time I ran the web app, but the phase when I was logging in – you’ll be getting the error the migrator internally throws. That might be enough to point you to the right direction, and maybe you’ll be able to figure out what’s wrong! But if that’s not the case, here’s the way to run Update-Database against your Azure Database!

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Exception of type ‘System.OutOfMemoryException’ was thrown.

IIS8

This post describes one of the more no-brainerish ways of fixing a ‘System.OutOfMemoryException’ exceptions being thrown in your MVC ASP.Net application using Entity Framework.

Problem

While developing a web project, for example ASP.NET MVC with EF, sometimes when handling a lot of data or complex entities on your dev machine, you encounter this error:

OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown.]
   System.Text.StringBuilder.ToString() +35
   System.IO.StreamReader.ReadToEnd() +123
   System.Web.Optimization.BundleFile.ApplyTransforms() +74
   System.Web.Optimization.DefaultBundleBuilder.BuildBundleContent(Bundle bundle, BundleContext context, IEnumerable`1 files) +472
   System.Web.Optimization.Bundle.GenerateBundleResponse(BundleContext context) +127
   System.Web.Optimization.Bundle.GetBundleResponse(BundleContext context) +45
   System.Web.Optimization.BundleResolver.GetBundleContents(String virtualPath) +166
   System.Web.Optimization.AssetManager.DeterminePathsToRender(IEnumerable`1 assets) +205
   System.Web.Optimization.AssetManager.RenderExplicit(String tagFormat, String[] paths) +35
   System.Web.Optimization.Scripts.RenderFormat(String tagFormat, String[] paths) +107
   System.Web.Optimization.Scripts.Render(String[] paths) +21

Reason

By default, Visual Studio uses 32-bit version of IIS Express for your deployments. In case you know what you’re doing, it’s safe and easy to change this, though.

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Solving the “Spatial types and functions are not available …” -problem

Spatial SQL types

This page describes mutiple ways on how to fix the exception ‘Spatial types and functions are not available for this provider because the assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Types’ version 10 or higher could not be found.‘ which comes up during debugging or publishing your program, app or service using DbGeography.

Symptoms

While running a console program or perhaps installing an ASP.NET MVC website on a machine, where SQL Server (apart from the one that comes with the Visual Studio) has not been installed, you may encounter the following error:

Spatial types and functions are not available for this provider because the assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Types’ version 10 or higher could not be found.

At least for me, this was baffling as that assembly was included in the project, and would compile and run flawlessly on other machines, just not on this one. I’m documenting here all the possible fixes to the issue I am aware of.

Problem / Reason

For me, the actual reason was that even though the DLL was loaded and included in the project as a nuget package, the actual native assemblies for this dll were not loaded to memory, as this needs to be done in the runtime. This issue was made worse by the fact that I first created this solution on a machine, where SQL Server was installed, so I was very much oblivious of the issue until it hit me on the face while trying to run my program on this particular machine, which did not have SQL Server.

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Using PowerShell to set ULS logging level to “extra verbose” to catch all the events in the logs

Stock photo from pixabay.com

This blog post describes how set the SharePoint’s ULS level to “Extra Verbose” (VerboseEx) using PowerShell. This is not possible using the browser UI, so some POSH magic is required! Luckily, it’s quite straightforward, but to avoid filling your hard drive(s) with huge log files, you should reset the level when you’re done debugging!

Description of the solution

By default, ULS logging is somewhat non-detailed. This means that a lot of data that could be used to debug issues is omitted. The UI cannot be used to set this level of logging to “Extra Verbose” – it is limited to verbose. In case you really, REALLY need to get all the data logged to ULS, you can use PowerShell to enable VerboseEx -level tracing, using the following command: Continue reading

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